Free Border Angels by Anthony Quinn Page B

more he chewed himself up with guilt.
    After the nurse had left, he went into the attic and began bringing down the boxes. He lifted out a silver leaf plaque, an award for dedication that he had received at the start of his police career. It was still in pristine condition, unlike most things from that period of his life. Downstairs he handed it to her.
    “What’s this?”
    “A gift.” He felt like a man alone on the deck of a sinking ship handing over all the last of his precious cargo.
    Reluctantly, she took it and placed it on the worktop.
    “I’m glad you’re doing this. The house feels lighter already.”
    He stared at his feet, reasoning that he should not feel so bad.
    “Do you need anything? Some shopping? Any odd jobs about the house?”
    “I have everything under control.” She took a tray from the fridge. On it were two freshly poured glasses of champagne. She handed him one, sipped the other. He downed the contents of the glass as quickly as he could.
    “Is this it?” he said, his voice flat. “Is this good-bye?”
    “No,” she replied. “Good-bye you should only have to say once. I just wanted to mark the occasion, that’s all.”
    “Shall I leave now?”
    “Yes.”

11
    The low winter fog shrouded the motorway as Daly drove home, hunched over the steering wheel. The boxes touched the roof of his car, blocking his vision through the rearview mirror. He found the effect disconcerting. Police officers in Northern Ireland took an unwritten oath to keep a wary eye fixed on the road behind when traveling through border country. However, on this occasion, it was not dissident terrorists but the ghosts of the past that made him anxious.
    He was half an hour from his cottage when he pulled off the motorway and delved deeper into the labyrinth of byroads crisscrossing the border. Armagh’s crooked, introverted little lanes were as familiar to him as the processes of his own mind. Thorn trees leaned out of the fog, their branches sweeping over the road, twigs scraping the car as he took flight from the city and his troubled past.
    A dark valley swallowed up the road. He drove as though hell-bent, descending into an underworld to escape the convoluted feelings of guilt and loss that were crippling his libido. Soon the car wheels bit into the loose stones of a lane. He stopped and switched on the headlights. The bulk of a dilapidated farmhouse appeared in the mist like an unsteady reflection on water. He killed the lights and waited for a while, his breath forming a cloud against the windshield. He was back at the border brothel. He had returned because he felt a need to reacquaint himself with its shadows, to find out more about the women imprisoned there, where they came from, and why they had been unable to escape even when they knew their pimp was dead. Sometimes, the bonds of cruelty were just as hard to untangle as those of love.
    He got out and stretched his legs. The house and outbuildings were a collection of gray fragments in the mist, the air still enough for a frost. At the bottom of the garden a pile of tree trunks, knotted with brambles, caught his attention. Their branches loomed out of the fog, smooth and sleek, like a gleaming jumble of female bodies, limbs floundering as if turning over in sleep. Then he noticed the smell, a faint scent wafting slowly through the darkening air from the shadows around the farmhouse. Daly recognized it instantly. The perfume on the photograph. The smell of roses and soap, female flesh and promised sex. He stood still and studied the silent house. He had not noticed the scent when he first got out of the car. He shifted his weight slowly and moved off the gravel path onto grass. It took less than a few seconds to scoot along the garden to the rear of the house. He peered through the windows, but the broken panes were sheets of blackness. The back door hung slightly ajar. He eased through it, half expecting a hand to grab him out of the darkness. He listened